As the popularity of sensors enabled with Internet connectivity grows, applications that communicate and manage these sensors will need to deal with large numbers of sensors. It has been estimated that in the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of Internet enabled sensors will grow to 26 billion units by 2020. Networking protocols to communicate with the Internet-enabled sensors are slowly getting standardized. One such networking protocol is Constrained Application Protocol, commonly abbreviated as “CoAP”.
CoAP protocol is designed to allow for communication with sensors which have limited computing resources and deployed in an environment where network connectivity is intermittent. It includes support for multi-cast IP addressing and provides a mechanism for discovering the manageable resources supported by a sensor.
To ensure that the applications managing and communicating with these sensors can scale up to manage a large number of sensors, what is desirable is a means to create a simulated environment made of a large number of sensors without needing to physically have the sensors themselves. What is also desirable is for these simulated sensors to give responses back in a manner similar to the real sensors. What is also desirable is for the simulated sensors, over the passage of time, to change the responses returned, as would be the case with real i.e. actual physical sensors. What is also desirable is for the simulated sensors to be able to model different error scenarios and intermittent network connectivity.